Lily Quill, Star Queen
by Haberdashing
Summary: The story of trans girl Lily Quill.


She was four and a half years old, and very insistent on including the _and a half_ in her age, when she first broached the topic with her mother.

"Mom?"

Her mother set down the book she had been reading and looked up at her. "Yes, hon?"

She hesitated for a brief moment before spitting out the question. "What would you call me if I was a girl?"

"Hmm... well, if you had been a girl, I was planning on naming you Lily. Your father used to call me his river lily; I think he would have appreciated that. And I was thinking Brandy for the middle name, after that song..." Her mother hummed a few bars of the song in question before adding, "Why do you ask?"

"Because..." She paused, biting her lip nervously as she struggled to put her thoughts into words. "Because I am a girl. I look like a boy, but I'm really a girl. And... and I want you to call me Lily."

Her mother looked at her for a long moment, her face bearing an inscrutable expression, before asking, "Are you sure?"

Even at the tender age of four and a half, Lily knew that there was more to her mother's question than met the eye, knew that what she was asking was no small thing; still, she didn't hesitate before responding. "I'm sure."

"Then that's settled, then." Lily's mother kissed her on the forehead, causing her to wrinkle her nose in exaggerated disgust. "From now on, you'll be my little star... queen, how does that sound? Lily Brandy Quill, queen of the stars."

Lily looked up at her mother for a moment before embracing her tightly, wrapping her arms around her mother's waist. "I love it."

"And I love you, dear."

The next day, the two went shopping for skirts and dresses for Lily, and if any onlookers glared at them, Meredith Quill paid them little heed.

Meredith wasn't perfect. She slipped up from time to time, used the wrong name or pronoun. But she tried. To her dying day, she tried to do right by her daughter, and Lily knew it, and that was what mattered most. Meredith Quill had known as soon as she learned of her pregnancy that her child was going to be extraordinary, and if young Lily said she was a girl, well, she knew herself better than anyone else would, and that was that.

It wasn't easy, though, being a girl who the doctors had called a boy in middle of nowhere, Missouri. Lily faced an uphill battle to be called by her own name, to be treated as just another girl, and as her mother's brain cancer progressed she had to face more and more of these challenges on her own.

In a way, it was a relief when Yondu picked up Lily after her mother's death. Yondu didn't share the qualms of most people Lily had known up until then; Yondu didn't care what was between her legs, or what some piece of paper back on Earth said her name was. All Yondu cared about was that she was skinny, could fit into places others couldn't, was good for thieving.

Slowly but surely, though, word got out.

Lily Quill started to get advice from those claiming to speak on behalf of a friend of a friend, or from anonymous notes slipped into places where she was sure to find them. Planets where they sold hormones on the black market for next to nothing. Make-up tips for a girl whose mother hadn't been around to teach her. How to find clothes that bolstered what needed bolstering and hid what needed hiding. Doctors who would perform any surgery you requested, no questions asked, so long as you paid in cash.

And fitfully, as the years spent working for Yondu turned to decades, her life guided in large part by anonymous advice, Lily grew up, grew from the feisty young girl Yondu had plucked from the middle of Missouri into so much more.

There were still any number of reasons that people would laugh at her when she claimed the title of Star Queen. She was a nobody, just another one of Yondu's underlings, and it was foolish to think that any one individual could hold the title of queen of the stars, let alone someone as seemingly unremarkable as Lily.

But nobody in the universe would doubt for long that Lily Quill was a woman.


End file.
